My own love affair with baseball started with the book Moneyball and Out Of The Park was the next step, long before I grew attached to a team and lost the months from April onwards to late night live broadcasts from distant timezones.
There's no doubt that come this time next year, I'll have played FM 15 more than just about any other game. It's a fixture in my life and this version isn't fundamentally flawed, but on the surface it's a baby step in the ongoing process and the majority of the changes feel like the edges of systems that are still working toward career-long implementation.
Despite my uncertainty about some of the specifics, it's a game that has me firmly in its clutches and I'm happy to be there. Maybe it's a hug rather than a clutch.
It's extremely rare to come across a game in which all of the details of that design intertwine so effectively. And then you realise it lets you redefine a lot of the parameters individually instead of having monolithic difficulty levels and, wow.
The way that ships, planets and research all simply accrue numbers in various areas rather than opening up new avenues to understand, explore and exploit makes Starships seem like a game set at the end of humankind's ambition rather than the beginning of a brave new age.
Warhammer Quest fits snugly onto a very specific shelf in my gaming library. It's not a game I'd miss if it were gone but, like a crossword puzzle or a Peggle, it's a perfectly acceptable side dish while my mind is multitasking. It's advantage over a crossword is that it doesn't require the attention of my linguistic lobes so I can more easily listen to people talking on a podcast while I'm playing.
It's a 4x game, sure, but it's a not a high or low fantasy one. It's weird fantasy and the weird cuts through to the playstyles as well as the art and fiction.
The title is evocative, don't you think, and even though the graphics are functional rather than fancy, the music and the sound of solitary engines in the vast loneliness capture something of the magnificence of travel and expansion. It's a game that really does impress with its scale and part of the cleverness of the automation is that it lets you sit back and enjoy the worlds you colonise or subdue.
I don't find it quite as exciting as Warlock II, which has such an unusual and habit-shattering structure, but they are very different beasts, despite appearances.
Sorcerer King deserves plaudits for being something altogether different rather than yet another iteration of a game we've been playing for decades.
If the game itself were as much of a mess as the port, I'd happily ignore the whole thing but Rocksteady are still capable of spectacle and style. Given the choice of one big budget collectathon series a year, and that's often all I can find time for, I'd pick Arkham almost every time.
I found myself admiring the work that had gone into it rather than the results. Man hits other men and those men fall down, and apart. It's a tale as old as time and there's nothing new to see except the "realtime physical dangling pieces".
Wizard Wars is a smart piece of design and worthy of far more attention than you probably imagine a free-to-play multiplayer spin-off deserves.
The Swindle is a minor diversion at best, without the comic timing or cunning to turn anyone to a life of crime. A weekend of crime, perhaps, at most.
In ye olde days, Call of Duty games would throw a famous quote up on the screen whenever you died, to provide a moment of reflection between attempts. Now that I've laid Blops III to rest, I've found a quote that seems like an echo of my thoughts and feelings. "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."
For all of the wonderful craft on show, Siege doesn't contain any surprises. It executes its plan to perfection but there's no room for deviation.
When I reviewed the ill-fated PC port of Arkham Knight, I said that the Arkham games were my go-to AAA series. On this form, they've got stiff competition. Here's hoping Syndicate isn't an anomaly and that the future of the series will be something other than history repeating itself.
Forget your Just Causes, your Uncharteds, your Battlfields and your Call of Duties – Broforce comes closer to capturing the beautiful chaos and heroic misadventures of a big budget action movie than any of them.
It's a shame that the skaven act so much like zombies rather than having their own distinct traits. But if Vermintide can act as the catalyst for a trend whereby at least one in every three zombie games is now a Skaven game instead, it will have served a wondrous purpose. The 'tide' suffix is excuse enough to have hordes of ratbeasts running mindlessly through the streets and it could happily be attached to 'Daemon', 'Corpse' or 'Green'. That said, 'Greentide' sounds like an off-brand toilet cleaner so perhaps that one would need a bit of a rethink.
For all of my complaints, I'd like to see more. More explorations of the weird places that we scrap, shoot and claw our way through as we play games. More short stories. More horror. If Funcom want to flesh out their Secret World with a few more side projects, I'll be a the front of the queue, even if I'm not convinced I'll enjoy the ride.